It Comes Back To You
by ShirouHokuto
Summary: Susan does her bit in the Time War.


**Author's Note: **_I had a desperate desire to join a certain challenge this year, but to qualify I needed one more Doctor Who fic, and - well, here's my one more! Susan got cameos in my other Time War fics, she deserved something of her own._

* * *

Susan hadn't wanted to be sensible. She'd always quite liked it when her parents had sighed and told her that she was irresponsible, just like her grandfather; she loved her grandfather, and she loved having this in common with him, a little quirk just for the two of them. They might quarrel sometimes, but they would always be the irresponsible ones of the family, gallivanting about the universe and never looking back, and Susan liked it that way.

Irresponsibility didn't work very well on an Earth that had to rebuild itself. If Susan neglected the garden for a few days to work on repairing a telecommunications center, then she didn't have fresh food. If Susan threw herself completely into gardening, she was wearing clothes with holes in all winter and getting frostbite. If Susan forgot this, if Susan put off doing that - it was awful, she hated it, she wanted to hop into the TARDIS and go somewhere new and let the humans take care of their own problems.

But she couldn't hop into the TARDIS anymore. Susan adapted instead, learned to schedule her time and sort things out by priority and manage whatever could be managed, and she was _responsible_. She became quite good at being responsible, actually, to the point where David and her other human friends sometimes forgot her early flightiness.

Susan didn't forget. She kept it hidden, but she still cherished her streak of irresponsibility, the urges to run off and let everything go hang. It was only temporary, this cloak of being sensible; once Earth got a proper space program going, she would be off to Gallifrey like a shot to finish up at the Academy and get a TARDIS of her own, and then - well, it wouldn't be quite the same, travelling without Grandfather, but it would be close enough. She'd be her own true and flighty self again, her grandfather's granddaughter, no matter how old she got or how many regenerations she went through.

Then the Time Lords called her back to Gallifrey, and not to put her back in school.

The cloak of responsibility never came off, now; it had settled into her skin like a second set of instincts, and only in her lowest moments did her younger self rise, screaming for her to get out and away, to leave the war behind, to find Grandfather and make him take her away. Grandfather had his own duties, anyway, and he was a different man. They'd only had brief chances to talk, but even so she could see that years of travelling without her hadn't done him any good - or perhaps it was only the war that made him seem darker and angrier, all his beloved faults magnified to ugliness by stress.

He was safe, though, as safe as she could keep him when Time itself was turning on its Lords and the Daleks ran rampant through the universe, and didn't _that_ feel strange, to be the one looking after him. But Grandfather danced recklessly through the war as if nothing could touch him and Susan worked to keep it that way, sending him reinforcements, ordering him back out of lost situations, being so responsible that it sometimes made her sick. One of them had to have some sense, though; the rest of the family wasn't there to have sense for them anymore.

(Susan had tried to protect them, too. It hadn't worked. She didn't think about it, because if she thought about it very much then she couldn't be sensible at all.)

Rassilon's revival threw sense and responsibility out of the window, at least for the Council. Susan didn't give in, voting against every terrifying proposal Rassilon brought up, but she was only one vote, and there were few left among the Council who hadn't given in to fear - of Daleks, of the war, of Rassilon himself. All her sense couldn't keep Gallifrey together, and her hard-earned responsibility made every burned home and broken body a scar on her hearts. She could have stopped this, she should have prevented that - beneath the cloak Susan wept and begged to run away, and above it she kept her face calm and friendly, pulled the Master out from under the rubble he'd buried himself in and argued with Rassilon and stayed.

When the whispers of the Final Sanction began to spread, she knew that the time for sense was over.

Tracking down the Moment could have been a story in its own right, but instead the former Lord President sent Susan a note from her exile with the coordinates coded within, and as if she were an adolescent again Susan snuck into the room beneath the Academy's ruins and stole it out of a dusty storeroom. It looked so harmless, the Moment: a simple white ball, smooth and cold, but if she were to touch it just so...

Susan shivered and stuffed the thing in her purse before leaving. She wasn't that much of a teenager anymore; the Moment was not for her to use, and she hoped it wouldn't be needed at all. If she could only talk some _sense_ into Rassilon - but that was as foolish a hope as any of Rassilon's schemes.

She hid the Moment in a pocket of Grandfather's new jacket and told him to get out before the Citadel was locked down, and then she went back to the Council to fight.

She hadn't wanted to be the sensible one. But the vote went against her and she told Grandfather to use the Moment and he begged her, "Let me just come back and get you," and Susan said, "No" - because it was too great a risk, because one of them had to stay on Gallifrey to make sure the war couldn't escape the timelock, because she couldn't be only the granddaughter with the same irresponsible streak anymore.

"Good luck, Grandfather," Susan said, closing the connection, and when the screen had shut off completely she leaned her forehead against it and whispered, "Don't look back."

He would just have to be irresponsible for them both.


End file.
